neuromodulation
(25)
Boston Scientific Built a $20 Billion Business From Smaller Incisions
The company’s most durable idea is also its smallest: reach the disease through a vessel, an opening or a pinprick - then turn that procedure into a platform.
Medtronic
Medtronic began by repairing hospital electronics in a Minneapolis garage. Seventy-seven years later, its devices sit inside bodies, beside beds, and at the center of a high-stakes contest to make medicine less invasive, more measurable, and easier to scale.
Axon Therapies, Inc.
Axon Therapies is a clinical-stage medical device company developing SAVM (Splanchnic Ablation for Volume Management), a minimally invasive, implant-free catheter procedure that ablates the greater splanchnic nerve to calm an overactive sympathetic nervous system and rebalance blood volume in patients with heart failure - particularly heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Incubated by the medtech studio Coridea and backed by leading healthcare investors, the company is advancing its Satera Ablation System through randomized, sham-controlled feasibility trials.
Axonis Therapeutics
Axonis Therapeutics is a Boston-based, neuro-focused biotechnology company developing first- and best-in-class oral small-molecule medicines that target KCC2, a chloride transporter that acts as the brain's master regulator of inhibitory neurotransmission. Spun out of research from Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Universite Laval, Axonis is advancing its lead candidate AXN-027 - a first-in-class KCC2 potentiator - toward clinical proof of concept in epilepsy, chronic pain and other CNS disorders, backed by an oversubscribed $115 million Series A closed in 2024.
Cognito Therapeutics, Inc.
Cognito Therapeutics is a Cambridge, Massachusetts clinical-stage neurotechnology company spun out of MIT that develops non-invasive, wearable therapy for neurodegenerative disease. Its lead product, Spectris, delivers precise gamma-frequency light and sound stimulation through connected glasses and headphones to evoke gamma brain oscillations, with the goal of slowing cognitive and functional decline in Alzheimer's disease. Spectris AD holds FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and is being evaluated in the HOPE Study, described as the largest medical device trial focused solely on Alzheimer's disease.
Enspire DBS Therapy, Inc.
Enspire DBS Therapy is a Cleveland-based, clinical-stage medical device company commercializing deep brain stimulation (DBS) paired with physical rehabilitation to restore arm and hand function in people living with chronic impairment after a stroke. Spun out of Cleveland Clinic in 2010, the company builds on more than a decade of research targeting the brain's dentate nucleus to re-establish neurological input during rehab. Its DBS-plus-rehab approach showed encouraging results in the first-in-human EDEN trial published in Nature Medicine, and Enspire is now running RESTORE, a multicenter pivotal study aimed at FDA marketing authorization.
Presidio Medical, Inc.
Presidio Medical is a clinical-stage medical device company in San Mateo, California, developing a proprietary Ultra Low Frequency (ULF) neuromodulation platform. By delivering very low frequency biphasic electrical currents through leads implanted in the epidural space, Presidio's spinal cord stimulation system reversibly blocks the conduction of pain signals along nerves without damaging tissue. Its first target is chronic nociceptive low back pain, a large and underserved indication with no approved SCS therapy. Backed by Deerfield Management and others, the company raised a $72M Series C in 2023 and received FDA IDE approval in 2025 to run its global pivotal FULFILL trial.
Joanna Stanicka
Joanna Stanicka is the co-founder, president and CEO of Axonis Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech developing first-in-class oral medicines that target the brain chloride transporter KCC2 to treat epilepsy, neuropathic pain and spinal cord injury. A Harvard-trained neuroscientist who began her career in cancer biology in Ireland, she moved from the bench to the boardroom, taking Axonis from a Boston Children's Hospital discovery to a company that raised a $115 million Series A in 2024 and pushed its lead drug, AXN-027, into first-in-human trials.
Nudge
Nudge is a San Francisco neurotechnology company building non-invasive, whole-brain interfaces powered by focused ultrasound. Founded in 2024 by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam alongside Jeremy Barenholtz and Quintin Frerichs, the company aims to stimulate and image deep brain circuits with millimeter precision - no surgery required. Its first human-ready system, Nudge Zero, is being used in research studies today, with a long-term goal of a headphone-like consumer device that lets people shift their brain state - sleep, focus, mood, habits - at the press of a button. Nudge raised a $100M Series A in July 2025 led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks.
XII Medical
XII Medical is a Union City, California medical device company building a minimally invasive neuromodulation therapy for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Founded in 2017 and led by CEO Garrett Schwab, the company is developing an implantable platform designed to be smaller, more flexible and easier to implant than existing nerve-stimulation systems - an alternative for the estimated 425 million people worldwide with moderate-to-severe OSA who struggle with CPAP masks. Backed by Cleveland Clinic, Ajax Health, Omega Funds and Intuitive Ventures, XII Medical closed a $45M Series B in August 2024 to fund product and clinical development.
Michael Onuscheck
Michael Onuscheck is CEO and Chairman of Presidio Medical, a San Mateo clinical-stage neuromodulation company developing an ultra-low-frequency waveform platform aimed at chronic pain. He joined in September 2021 after two years on the board, returning to neuromodulation after leading Alcon's global businesses and, earlier, Boston Scientific's Neuromodulation division.
Scott Kokones
Scott Kokones is co-founder and CEO of Enspire DBS Therapy, a Cleveland Clinic portfolio company building an implantable deep brain stimulation system paired with physical rehab to restore arm function in stroke survivors. He is running the RESTORE pivotal trial after the EDEN proof-of-concept study, having raised $27.9M total including a $17.6M Series B in 2023 and a $10.3M Series B1 in January 2026. Alongside Enspire he is a general partner at Guide Medical Ventures and a co-founder of Qr8 Health and CardioSolv Ablation Technologies. His earlier career runs through Intelect Medical, Boston Scientific, Enpath Medical, and Medtronic.
Zoar Engelman
Zoar Engelman is the co-founder and CEO of Axon Therapies, a clinical-stage medical device company chasing a stubborn problem: heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, a condition that has resisted nearly every drug thrown at it. A biomedical engineer with a PhD from the University of Auckland, Engelman spent two decades turning lab ideas into implantable and catheter-based devices, co-founding roughly nine ventures and helping raise more than $150 million along the way. In September 2025 he stepped up from Chief Scientific Officer to CEO as Axon closed an oversubscribed $32 million Series A to advance SAVM, an implant-free procedure that quiets an overactive sympathetic nervous system to rebalance the body's blood volume.
Attune Neurosciences, Inc.
Attune Neurosciences is a San Francisco-based, clinical-stage medical device company building what it calls the first wearable, non-invasive focused-ultrasound system for deep brain therapy. Its investigational headband, ATTN201, uses low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) to reach precise deep-brain targets - like the central medial thalamus - while recording EEG and head movement, aiming to treat sleep and wake disorders, depression, addiction recovery, and other neurological and psychiatric conditions without drugs or surgery.
Coherence Neuro
Coherence Neuro is a San Francisco medical-device company building closed-loop neurotechnology to treat cancer as a continuously monitored condition rather than a reactive battle. Founded in 2022 by University of Cambridge researchers Ben Woodington and Elise Jenkins, the company decodes the body's electrical signals in real time and delivers adaptive, AI-tuned stimulation through its flagship SOMA system - a wireless implant, wearable, and mobile app working together. Backed by a $10M seed round led by Artesian and Topology Ventures, Coherence aims to begin first-in-human trials in 2026.
Elemind Technologies
Elemind Technologies is a Cambridge, Massachusetts neurotech company spun out of MIT that makes a wearable EEG headband which reads your brainwaves and plays phase-locked acoustic pulses through bone conduction to help you fall asleep faster - without drugs. Founded by a group of leading neuroscientists and led by CEO Meredith Perry, the company launched its $399 'sleep on demand' headband in 2024 after raising $12 million in seed funding. Its broader ambition is an 'app store for the brain': one wearable running different neuromodulation protocols for sleep, tremor, memory and beyond.
NeuroBionics
NeuroBionics is a Boston-area neurotechnology company spun out of more than a decade of MIT research. It builds hair-thin, flexible bioelectronic fibers that reach neural targets through the body's blood vessels instead of open surgery. Its lead device, evStim, aims to deliver deep brain and peripheral nerve stimulation endovascularly, potentially widening access to neuromodulation therapy for conditions like Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, chronic pain, and depression.
Anuj Bhardwaj
Anuj Bhardwaj is the co-founder and CEO of SecondWave Systems, a Minneapolis-St. Paul medical device company building the SecondWave MINI, a wearable, noninvasive ultrasound device that aims to calm chronic inflammation by aiming focused sound at the spleen. He took a family-owned industrial ultrasound business founded by his parents in 1977 and redirected its core technology toward medicine, raising a $7M Series A in 2025 on top of more than $15M in government research funding from DARPA, NIH, and ARPA-H. Trained as a mechanical engineer at Penn State with an MS and MBA from MIT, he sits at the crossroads of hardware, bioelectronic medicine, and the emerging field of bio-ultrasonic therapy.
Coach Wei
Coach Wei is a serial technology entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Neural Galaxy, a brain-science company spun out of Harvard Medical School and MIT that maps the individual human brain and delivers personalized neuromodulation therapy for brain disorders. A Tsinghua University electrical engineer with an MS from MIT, he began building software at EMC before founding three venture-backed startups over two decades: Nexaweb (pioneering Rich Internet Applications), Yottaa (web performance and cloud), and now Neural Galaxy, which has raised roughly $100M including a $75M Series A. He holds six patents and was named to Boston's 40 Under 40.
Meredith Perry
Meredith Perry is the co-founder and CEO of Elemind, a neurotech company building a wearable headband that reads your brainwaves in real time and nudges them with bursts of sound, marketed as sleep on demand. Before Elemind she was the inventor behind uBeam, the ultrasonic wireless-charging venture she dreamed up as a University of Pennsylvania undergrad and grew into a roughly $40 million, much-debated startup backed by Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mark Cuban and Marissa Mayer. A trained paleobiologist and astrobiologist who once did research with NASA, Perry holds dozens of patents and now wants to build what she calls an app store for the brain.
MJ Antonini
MJ Antonini is the co-founder and CEO of NeuroBionics, an MIT spinout building hair-thin, flexible bioelectronic fibers that thread through blood vessels to reach deep neural structures - delivering deep brain stimulation without opening the skull. A Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology graduate who trained in both medicine and engineering, he turned a decade of fiber research from Polina Anikeeva's MIT lab into a venture-backed company that raised an oversubscribed $10M seed round to push toward first-in-human trials.
Raphael Certain
Raphael Certain is the founder and CEO of Clarity, a Franco-American neurotechnology company building a wearable virtual-reality headset that delivers personalized light and sound stimulation at gamma frequencies to support the aging brain. A self-taught entrepreneur who pivoted from marine biology to neurophysiology, he turned a master's thesis at the Neurodegenerative Diseases Institute in Bordeaux into a venture-backed company. By 24 he had raised more than $1.3 million, assembled an international team of 20-plus people across Paris and San Francisco, and built partnerships with leading universities in the US and UK.
Emilė Radytė
Emilė Radytė is a Harvard- and Oxford-trained neuroscientist and the co-founder and CEO of Samphire Neuroscience, a London-based neurotech company building drug-free, hormone-free wearable devices for menstrual health. Her flagship product, Nettle, is a head-worn device using non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to target the neurological drivers of menstrual pain and mood symptoms. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list in 2024, she came up through emergency medicine at Harvard and a PhD in psychiatry and engineering at Oxford, and reframes conditions like PMS and PMDD as questions of brain circuitry rather than hormones alone.
Neural Galaxy
Neural Galaxy (also operating as Galaxy Brain Scientific) is a Beijing-based brain science company building a precision, non-invasive neuromodulation platform. Its proprietary personalized Brain Functional Sectors (pBFS) technology maps over 200 functional regions of an individual brain, then guides targeted transcranial magnetic stimulation with millimeter accuracy. Founded in 2019 by Harvard and MIT neuroscientists with serial entrepreneur Coach Wei, the company is running clinical and registration trials across depression, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, autism and aphasia, and has raised roughly $93M to date.
Rami Elghandour
Rami Elghandour is Chairman and CEO of Arcellx (NASDAQ: ACLX), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation cell therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases. An engineer turned venture capitalist turned serial CEO, he has led two successful IPOs, built two multibillion-dollar public companies, and raised over $1.75 billion in capital. At Arcellx, he transformed the company from an early-stage startup into a commercial-ready organization with a peak valuation exceeding $6 billion, advancing the anito-cel BCMA CAR-T therapy toward FDA approval for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. A TEDx speaker on unconscious bias and gender equity, Rami is also an executive producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' and the Sundance-premiered 'American Doctor.'